It’s Good To Be Back

So, I guess many of you noticed that this blog was down from Tuesday, November 19 at 1:00 PM PST until today.  I’m sorry to disappear without warning, but the truth is that I did not even know about it until 2 hours after it happened.

I did notice on Monday the 18th that my traffic had gone up ten-fold, but I did not know that my host would pull the plug over that.  They put up with it for what I assume was 24 hours and then advised us that they had placed a temporary block on the account because “This account was found to be consuming an inordinate amount of processor time, to the point of degrading overall system performance. While we do limit each account to no more than 25% of a system’s CPU in our terms of service, we do not actively disable accounts until they greatly exceed that number, which is what happened in this case.” Wow.

2013-09-19Here is a screenshot of my stats. You can click on it to make it larger, if you like. Remember that they took me offline in the middle of Tuesday so we can probably assume that if they had not, the hits that day would have doubled. Now, most of those visits were short. According to statCounter over 90% of those visits were less than 5 seconds. I wondered about that, but found out that only means that they visited only one page. Also, I have rarely had less than 75% of my visitors in that category ever.

So, to what do we owe this tremendous influx of attention? Since I use the free account on StatCounter, I can only see the 500 most recent stats. On Monday evening the most recent hits were from a message board. On Tuesday, they were mainly from Google. So, apparently it was the backlash of the Williams Trial. More and more pieces were written about the verdict and people were sharing them. On top of that, there has been a campaign to get Amazon.com to stop selling the book To Train Up A Child by Michael Pearl.  Many who saw these pieces googled the book and found my Quotes page. You will find those posts on my Facebook Page and I have compiled them into a post here.

Once I found that my site was down, I discussed it with Rebecca Diamond, who made this site for me. She explained the problem and offered to fix it and eventually move the blog to a new server. I am so thankful for her and her willingness to carve out time in her busy schedule to do this.

While I was offline I had some time to think and have decided to make a few changes.

1)  This is a Christian blog which is written by and for Christians.  Non-believers are welcome to read here and to comment.  However, I have been remiss by allowing people to spew hatred around my blog and Facebook page.  The purpose of this blog is for sharing arguments against dangerous teachings and encouraging gentle parenting.  Recently, I posted the following on my FB page:

I totally understand the anger directed at the Pearls due to their dangerous teachings, but I truly believe that they are misguided and fail to understand having been blinded by pride. I will not have flames or profanity either on my blog nor on this page, not even directed to the Pearls.

I will be removing such comments as I find them.  Here are some replies to that statement which I really liked:

Yes, no matter what they’re still people for whom Christ died and He loves them. He has every hair on their heads counted. Satan has blinded their eyes…and whatever happened to them as children is probably making it impossible for them to humble themselves to see their error. But, there is always hope and I will hope that they will see it and I know when they do God will hold them and not spank/punish them for what they’ve done…

I think it’s often hurt people who hurt people and somewhere we have to stop the cycle of aggression. As someone who was raised with the Pearl teachings, developed delayed-onset PTSD because of them, and helps run a support group of a bunch of other homeschool kids who also report how toxic this “first time obedience” corporal punishment “breaking the will” stuff was for them, I still don’t feel comfortable insulting the Pearls. However, I will say that they are very very misguided, that they are encouraging and enabling child abuse, and that they should pull the book, tell parents to stop using it, and publicly apologize for causing harm.

Thank you to who ever manages this site, because we are discredited when we start to be abusive ourselves. We seek to speak honourably and you can be totally right and totally wrong just by an attitude.

the gift of GRACE–which was given to US by a God who loved us enough to DIE for us, when we were still in sin–is by far the best gift we can extend to anyone.  Even the Pearls.

2) I have decided that posting links directly to my Facebook page as I find them and then writing them into a blog post later is good. I plan to continue doing that. I will try to do that also with Twitter. Not sure about Google Plus, I’ll probably keep it the same for now. The easiest place to find old links would be here as they are tagged and categorized. The benefit of Facebook is that you get them right away. They also often have nice pics.

By the way, if anyone has been wondering why I rarely use pics, this is why. I do not want to violate any copyright so I have to use my own pictures. I don’t usually have a picture which I feel would work. If I had to work on getting one, it would have to be perfect and I would never post. 🙂

2 Comments

  1. Guy smalley on November 25, 2013 at 1:19 am

    I am disgusted by this book as a victim of parents who beat hit and other wise were mean taught me that there was a better way, i had kids late in my life but never have i had to rise my hand to my boys, a baby is crying to communicate not irritate it can’t talk, or understand pain the parent is inflicting, if i ever saw someone hitting a child with a pvc pipe or switch they would know first hand how it felt, and i would gladly go to court for that enjoyment .

  2. […] traffic generated by Google searches and was taken offline from the 19th until today as explained here. So, here is a rundown of the posts and articles I missed posting during that […]

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